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have an Ubuntu PC that runs all of the apps I need...and they were all free. The only place that it does not match up is in gaming and my understanding is that if I were to buy Crossover, that would be solved.As far as ease of use goes, I found it no harder to learn to use than it was to learn to use a Macintosh and everybody keeps telling me that a Mac is easier to use than Windows.

I mean no offense here. But the reality is, you're on Slashdot, you're saying Ubuntu is as easy OSX, has all apps you need, and objectively speaking, from this I can tell you don't even have a clue how far from an average user you are.

You wouldn't also acknowledge that in 2008-2009 we saw the likes of HP and Dell try to sell Ubuntu computers, soon cancelled due to vastly higher return rates and tech support calls.

...Yet they will not take even consumer friendly Ubuntu seriously. IS the idea of Linux as a consumer friendly OS a dead end?

Consumer friendly would mean at least as easy as Windows (you'd think it's not a high bar), and to have all apps users would want/need.

On this basis, I'd say the closest to consumer friendly Linux has ever gotten is Android, and their app market is doing worse than iOS / Windows Phone 7 right now (amazing for WP7, didn't expect that in mere 4 months).

And that's mobile, nothing on the desktop. So if you see such an animal as a consumer friendly Linux on the desktop, let me know.

CFL/LED come with different temperature ratings. As in color. Pick the right rating, and it gives warmer ("yellower") light, like what you're used to.

However as a person who was in exactly the same spot as you few years ago, here's the real cause of your problem: habit. Habit bends perception. Moving from incandescent to CFL was something I felt unnatural and unnecessary, like moving from CRT to LCD monitors back at the time.

But you need to move on. Especially because once you've used CFL for some time, you realize, it's just light, and you get used to anything.

Do you intentionally post wrong information so we can rush to angrily correct you in the comments?

They ban only GPL variations and licenses like it that have *enforced* right to redistribute source. Licenses like Apache, MIT, BSD are not affected.

This is the same as Apple's App Store. The line of thought that GPL is "infectious" and represents a risk for their closed source components is well known. Right or wrong, that's their motive, and they are taking precautions to protect themselves from lawsuit trolls.

There's no "app-ification of the web", there's just a rush to cash in on the "app" and "appstore" buzzwords that Apple pushed from solely developer lingo into the mainstream.

Those are bookmarks. But with their secondary menus and new, more confusing ways to do the same old stuff they try to blur boundaries between web and apps. Boundaries, which people need, as a sandboxed browser site and an app is not the same thing by a long shot.

In the end, this will only push users away and to whoever offers the simplest experience.

MPEG-LA has pledged to "never" charge for serving "free of charge" content over the web right now. That doesn't mean they're not going to charge for it in the future, they revisit the question over and over.

Ok, that's wrong, and despite multiple accounts of being corrected, people here keep perpetuating this myth. They're not going to revisit it. The decision is final.

But the question comes down to what constitutes as "free view" over the web? If you look at major hits such as RayWilliamJohnson, people like that "profit" off of making videos on the internet. He's got t-shirt deals that now have his stuff being sold in Hot Topic stores across the country. He's a pretty big Youtube phenomenon as a result of videos being posted on the internet "for free".

MPEG LA's defines non-free view as "AVC video sold to end users for a fee on a title or subscription basis". So it's very simple: can you view the entire video without being required to purchase it? It's free. If you need to buy it/rent it/subscribe for it, it's not free. Having ads or merchandise or other indirect profit models around or over or in the video is irrelevant.

You're right that everything "costs money" and some things have direct and indirect costs. The difference is that to ensure the internet remains open and competitive for everyone, we need to make sure that as much driving force behind the technology standards used by the vast majority of it are for the public good.

And yet, the automatic assumption is Google has singlehandedly pulled a rabbit out of their hat, because all some people need to know is that it's "free", and may any other annoying details and facts be ignored.

On one side, we have H.264 designed with the feedback of a wide consortium of experts, companies and respected standardization organisations, and very clear and apt licensing rules.

On the other side, Google and their technically inferior, buggy H.264 clone with an untold number of IP violations. But don't take just my word for it.

In layman's terms, we call what the MPEG-LA doing as a "bait and switch".

The above clarifications renders this remark baseless. The problem in this debate is some people prefer to arm themselves with an ideology fueled narrative and a set of outdated or outright wrong talking points about supposed "bait and switch" threats and preserving "freedom", and don't bother to even check what they're talking about.

By using h.264, you pretty much guarantee that *someone* *somewhere* is paying for it. Could you imagine if say, the "David After Dentist" kid had to pay tons and tons of royalties to the MPAA for a video they created simply because they used the h.264 container format? To even conceive such a thing is such bullshit that this should absolutely be a non-issue.

"David After Dentist" is served as H.264 right now and tens of millions of people have seen that H.264 by now, in their browsers, smartphones and so on. Today.

How much did little David pay? Nothing. First, MPEG LA has never, and has pledged to never in the future charge for serving free of charge H.264 content over the web. That includes sites with ads like YouTube. Second, little David would never even dream to serve the traffic of millions of video views online for free, even with WebM. Serving a video to millions of people costs money. In fact it costs more than the money YouTube spent to encode that video to H.264 using their officially licensed encoder. But YouTube covers both costs, so to David, it's his free speech, free as in beer, in H.264.

Try to reconcile that with your scary picture of the future with H.264.

You are clearly biased against Google and WebM. You refuse to look at the reality of the situation. Apple fanboy, perhaps?

I'm not biased against Google, I'm biased against their poor choices of late, primarily because they seem like poor choices. And maybe slightly desperate.

May I remind you the "reality of the situation" is yet about to happen. I know that from the point of view on Slashdot, every next year is the Year of the Linux on the Desktop, and so on, but although the future of WebM seems so simple and clear to you, I wouldn't call any bets yet if I were you.

I'm trying to point out that Google is climbing steeper and stepper hills lately, so I believe the odds are against them. They might just as well pull a rabbit out of their collective hats, but we're yet to see that.

You guys cheer, but for Google, this is only a part of a bigger game: the platform battle. If Google loses the platform users access them through, which is currently mostly desktop browsing, their core business: ads (with search) may fizzle out very quickly.

Hence why their hurried entering into markets that are quite foreign to them, such as mobile (Android), browsers (Chrome) and, somehow, also video codecs (WebM). With their politically clumsy attempts at hedging bets that keep the platform available to them, they have managed to piss off all of their former corporate pals at Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, MPEG LA etc. etc.

I know the apparent "openness" of their choices makes some of you guys feel warm and fuzzy, but make no mistake: no one else is amused. Google has been singled out by the big platform keepers for extermination: Google has to throw everything in this battle and win the platform, because if they lose to their former buddies, it's over.

Hold up buddy, the second they start breeding BIG insects, you know some are going to get loose and we're going to have another issue on our hands. I don't need to have nuclear fallout size giant roaches running around.

The exoskeletal architecture of insects would make large specimens fragile, so they probably wouldn't be able to easily run away and thrive independently in nature.

Even if they did, they'd be easy to control and exterminate.

This is one reason why large arthropods are primarily found in water, but not on land.

Apparently these rules did nothing to help Senator Ted Kennedy from being placed on the no-fly list.

Check this blurb:

"Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed."

How do you avoid being embarrassed again? You white-list the people who have enough power, visibility or popularity to be sufficiently noticeable.

When the small people are encumbered, no one in the TSA is embarrassed. They're fine with it.